Word: fermat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...call mathematics a fin-de-siecle craze would be a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something remarkable about how the most arcane of academic disciplines has finally implanted itself firmly in popular culture. The trend began in 1994 when Princeton University's Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a cantankerous problem that had defeated the best mathematical minds for more than 350 years. Not since Archimedes ran naked from his bathtub shouting "Eureka!" has a mathematician received more publicity. PEOPLE magazine put him on its list of "the 25 most intriguing people of the year...
...number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste of our friends across the pond when my book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers shared the London Times best...
...although the Gap could not persuade Wiles to pose, other advertisers have succeeded in working mathematics into their marketing messages. Merrill Lynch hailed the Fermat proof in its "human achievement" ads; and Fendi, declaring in Pidgin English that "a woman is theorem which cannot be solved," introduced its Theorema line of enigmatic fragrance, body lotion and bath...
...before you write me off as just another insane Harvard kid who was accepted simply for his ability to prove Fermat's last theorem backwards in tongues, hear...
...Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles reveals his proof for Fermat's Last Theorem, which was proposed in the 17th century...